Exhibition: Czechia Now!

Developed by fashion designer Kateřina Plamitzerová, fashion photographer Michaela Karásková and garden architect Lucie Králíková, Czechia Now! is a multifaceted fashion and photography exhibition resulting from an unconventional research trip around the Czech Republic.

”We travel through the Czech Republic, passing through rural and urban areas, towns and remote villages. We watch the local people and their way of dressing. We observe squares, we wait until the shift finishes in a factory, we visit pubs. It is our personal anthropological research. We try to answer a number of questions:

Do people go to certain places dressed in a similar way?
What influences these similarities?
Based on these similarities, could we create contemporary costumes for certain urban and rural areas?”

The Czechia Now! exhibition in London has been specifically designed for the gallery of Czech Centre London and presents a collection of clothes, photographs, videos and objects taken from exhibitions around Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. The clothes reflect the contemporary reality of a particular place and its inhabitants and this innovative exhibition, which combines fashion with audiovisual and ethnographic travel recordings, presents an unpretentious - yet affectionate - view of the Czech Republic of today. Czechia Now! embodies both, an ode and irony all in one.

The first areas to be explored were Ostrava, Třinec, Sušice a Šluknov. However, Czechia Now! is a long-term project, which aims to gradually map our whole country and give an insight into the Czech Republic of today.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

KATEŘINA PLAMITZEROVÁ is a fashion designer based in Prague. In 2016 she graduated from the Fashion and Footwear Studio led by Liběna Rochová at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She was nominated for the Fashion Designer of the Year at the Czech Grand Design Awards for her Nihon Lobendau Diploma Collection.

MICHAELA KARÁSEK ČEJKOVÁ is a photographer from Prague mainly specialized in fashion and portrait photography. In 2015 she finished MA studies at the Department of Photography of FAMU in Prague and she undertook the study internships at the Aalto School of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki and at Alla Carta Magazine in Milan.

LUCIE KRÁLÍKOVÁ is a landscape architect from Brno. Together with architect Klára Zahradníčková Lucie founded the organic floristry Efemér. They believe in ecological agriculture and working with local growers and offer an alternative to the modern floral industry.